


Ghosting

by Enjoloras



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Era, F/M, M/M, based around my other fics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-07
Updated: 2017-07-07
Packaged: 2018-11-29 00:19:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11429262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Enjoloras/pseuds/Enjoloras
Summary: The letter is pages long, scrawled in a manner that does not match with Enjolras' other writings. It seems erratic, desperate, as though written with too much emotion to allow for neat handwriting. Marius scans along the first few lines, and soon he finds himself lost in it's contents. They reveal before him a scandalous story, and Marius feels his breath catch in his throat, stunned by the words on the pages. Enjolras had been born a woman. He had been born a woman, and, what's more, had loved, as passionately and angrily and foolishly as any other human. That foolishness, it also seemed, had borne fruit – a child.In wake of the June rebellion and the death of his friends, Marius Pontmercy takes it upon himself to settle the affairs of the dead. He soon learns some of the group had secrets - particularly their leader. Now, burdened with guilt and a sense of responsibility, Marius finds himself faced with an impossible task; raising the son of a revolutionary, gone before his time.





	Ghosting

**Author's Note:**

> Warning for some slight misgendering of Enjolras/badly explained trans issues, since it's the 1800's and Marius probably wouldn't quite get it - and it's not like Enjolras is there to explain.

On some days he feels as if he is a ghost. On some days, those darker days, he looks into the mirror and sees nothing but a faded wraith; not a man, but the faint, murky shadow of one banished to walk between the veil of life and death. On some days, the darkest days, Marius Pontmercy believes he should be dead. He has tried to scrape a life from the chaos of the barricades, tried to move on, but it feels as though he has built the foundations of his new life upon the bones of his friends. He jerks out of his sleep in the night, still smelling gunpowder in his nose. The street in front of the Corinth has long since been cleared of debris, but the dried blood between the paving stones is harder to scrub out, and the memory of what transpired there harder still.

Cosette is an angel, of that Marius is sure, and he clings to her goodness like a drowning man would clutch at driftwood. She is there to hold him when he wakes from his nightmares, with a soft kiss for his brow and a soothing lullaby for his ears. Heaven must surely miss her presence, Marius thinks, when he falls back to sleep with his head in her lap. Sometimes she is the only thing that keeps him going; when the dark days seem ready to smother him she breaks through the clouds like the summer sun. He watches her strolling through the gardens, or humming gently to herself as she combs her hair, and is reminded with these small, simple moments of beauty that life goes on.

Honour bound to their memory, he takes the painful task to settle the affairs of the dead upon himself. He does the work of corpses, making visits to grieving wives and heartbroken mothers, packing away belongings and returning them to families. He learns things about the group that he never knew before; full, complex lives beyond their politics come unfurling before his eyes. Joly and Bossuet's shared mistress now has a fatherless child on the way, and Marius sees to it she receives a generous stipend for her two great losses. He discovers that Bahorel had a young sister who relied upon him, and Jean Prouvaire an almost complete anthology of poetry he had hoped to put into publication. He learns that Combeferre's family had picked out a wife for him, but that the girl is now a widow before her wedding, and mourns for a man whom she only danced with once, but who's portrait she keeps in a locket. It saddens Marius that he cannot comfort her; he has no idea if Combeferre would have loved her back. Marius weeps for each and every one of them, their lives so woefully incomplete and their youth so pointlessly spent. Paris has not changed; people come and go as though the students that died along Rue de la Chanvrerie never existed.

He leaves Enjolras to last, puts it off and puts it off as though if he does so it might never come about. He feels a visceral sort of shame when he thinks of the dead leader, though he had not known the man particularly well, as aloof and private as he was in his personal affairs. Marius feels almost that Enjolras' belief in their cause ought to have spared him. He feels that perhaps there has been some grave misunderstanding – a morbid pun, he thinks – and that fate has made a grievous mistake. It should be Enjolras living; Enjolras, who had a radiant aura about him that Marius felt ought to have made him impervious to bullets. How was it that muskets had felled him so easily? Gods were not supposed to fall to mortal weapons.

The leader's lodgings are sparse and cold, and Marius wonders if they have always been that way. He thinks not, in spite of Enjolras' sometimes unapproachable demeanour. He thinks that once there must have been some warmth in the room; a crackling fire, a few touches of the personal scattered here and there. Anything of any value has long since been sold by the landlord, but a few things remain, lonely artefacts that attest to his life. Enjolras' books have been piled away in a corner to gather dust, as though exiled to shame. The radical ideals they promote have made them as dangerous to the touch as hot coals, and nobody wants to be caught holding them following the failed insurrection. Books can be as deadly as any bayonet, Marius has learnt. There is no innocence, even in ideas.

Enjolras' own writings remain as well, stored in a box beneath the bed. Amongst them are some of his correspondences and diary entries, some political musings and a few of the inflammatory political flyers from the Musain. Marius finds it oddly comforting to see where Enjolras has scratched out words and circled phrases, where he has underlined parts and made notes in the margins. It is a testament to his humanity. At the very bottom of the box, tied neatly into a bundle with string, Marius discovers a stack of unsent letters. One is addressed to Enjolras' mother, and it pains Marius to think that she has not received it, that some woman maybe with the same silk spun gold hair of Enjolras is wondering why her son had to die. At the bottom of the pile he finds a much thicker letter in a large envelope; the address is one just outside of Paris, and the name of the intended recipient, 'Camille Marie,' is written in Enjolras' elegant handwriting with a sort of hard urgency that holds Marius' attention. He feels ashamed as he thumbs open the envelope, but it seems of vital importance somehow. He wonders if it is possible to invade a dead man's things. Do ghosts value their privacy?

The letter is pages long, scrawled in a manner that does not match with Enjolras' other writings. It seems erratic, desperate, as though written with too much emotion to allow for neat handwriting. Marius scans along the first few lines, and soon he finds himself lost in it's contents. They reveal before him a scandalous story, and Marius feels his breath catch in his throat, stunned by the words on the pages. Enjolras had been born a woman. He had been born a woman, and, what's more, had loved, as passionately and angrily and foolishly as any other human. That foolishness, it also seemed, had borne fruit – a child. Marius tried to visualise he and Grantaire together, but he could not. They were too different. He could not hear Enjolras speaking to Grantaire with anything but the lofty pity he afforded him in the Musain. He could hear no gentleness, no declarations of love, no sweet words whispered in the dark between them. His tongue had been made for speeches, not poetry. He had the heart of a warrior, not the lips of a lover. Yet Camille existed, at least it seemed so, and children did not simply spring fully formed from their father's foreheads like Athena. There had to have been some manner of relations between them for a child to be created, and Marius found he blushed like a coquette to even imagine it, despite that he himself was wed.

The letter does not just tell a story; it also speaks at almost exhausting length of sacrifice. It details Enjolras' decision in going to fight – and likely die, as it transpired to be - upon the barricades, and how it was all so that Camille might have the privilege of growing up in a better world. It reads with a sad, pitifully persuasive air to it, as though even as he penned it Enjolras was striving to convince both himself and his son that he had made the right choice. Beneath the noble sentiments Marius can feel a reluctance that he had never witnessed in Enjolras. Could it really be that the marble lover of liberty had, at a point, harboured doubts about the insurrection? Had he, suddenly encumbered with the inconvenience of parental love, considered abandoning their goal to raise his child? The thought was almost impossible to comprehend, yet the way Enjolras speaks in the letter suggests it may have been so. Some of the words have run in places, suspicious spots of blotted ink dappling the paper, and Marius finds himself wondering if they are the remnants of tears.

He takes the letter home to Cosette, along with the few of Enjolras' belongings he can carry. He cannot banish thoughts of the child from his mind, and that night he lays awake, for once haunted not by the dead, but by one of the living. He worries, tossing and turning on the mattress, trying to imagine how the infant can possibly be loved by a family who only took him in for the money Enjolras could provide them. When the sun breaks over the horizon and spills into their bedroom, he wakes Cosette, confessing to what he has found. She has barely finished reading the letter for herself when she takes Marius' hand in her's, her deep blue eyes wide and severe and hopelessly beautiful. She tells him with gentle certainty they must find the boy, and raise him themselves. It is only right, she says. Her own father would have urged them to do the same.

They find the family that have taken in Camille easily enough through the address on the letter. They are of modest wealth and name, with a pleasant home and several older children. They anticipate some kind of conflict on the matter of taking the child, but find, distressingly, that the lady of the house has no apparent qualms about handing him over to two strangers who claim to have known his parents. He is another mouth to feed, and, she tells them, she has received none of the allowance Enjolras set aside for his son since his death. 'I think his mother is dead,' she says with cold indifference to the matter, 'And his father was one of those foolish schoolboys who got themselves killed. I don't want anything to do with a criminal's child. He has reckless blood. He'll grow up to do just the same, mark me.'

Marius finds himself immediately defensive; 'His parents were fine people,' he says.

The baby is still small, not yet able to stand. He has the stern blue eyes of Enjolras, and the thick dark curls of Grantaire. If Marius had still doubted his parentage at all, then to lay eyes upon the child would have immediately killed any uncertainty. He resembles Grantaire more-so, but there is something that shines through him that is so much of Enjolras it cannot be denied. Cosette lifts the child into her arms as naturally as if she had carried him in her womb. She rocks him for a moment, laying a gentle kiss upon his forehead, and he settles into her embrace. She loves him immediately; Marius knows in an instant that they have made the right decision. They thank the family and take their leave, the baby in tow.

A child is a difficult adjustment, they soon learn. They wake constantly to Camille's cries, and Marius soon forgets what it is to sleep well through the night for reasons that are not painful dreams. Though they have use of a housekeeper and nanny, Cosette seems to take pleasure in tending to him herself, singing to him in that honey sweet voice that Marius is sure only angels could have bestowed upon her. She says he is a blessing, a gift, something utterly good that has come from so much bad. Marius agrees, but privately his heart feels heavy with guilt that they should enjoy the joys of parenthood when Enjolras and Grantaire do not. Their love conceived him, Enjolras carried and laboured with him, and yet it is Marius and Cosette that get to see him grow and smile and laugh the way that children do. I have stolen this happiness, he thinks. Though he knows not of Grantaire's feelings towards the child, there had been no doubt from the tone of Enjolras' letter that he had loved his son. He thinks, knowing Grantaire, that he probably loved him too. Underneath his cynicism, Marius fancied there existed a man who would have been fond of children, and of all the innocent hope and promise that they embodied.

Children grow quickly, and by the age of five he is rambunctious and spirited, with the stubborness of an ox to boot. He is a confusing blend of his parents' personalities, and there are days he seems more of Grantaire and days he is only Enjolras. He is righteous in all his childish endeavours, certain in all his young convictions, and Marius often fears that one day those traits will lead him to his end on the point of a bayonet. At the same time, like Grantaire before him, he draws – only the strange scribblings of a child for now, but, Marius thinks, he has the potential to have great skill in the matter. He enjoys music and languages, and it seems there is no end to the boy's thirst for knowledge. He looks like Grantaire - so much so that some of their friends begin to whisper of Cosette's infidelity behind their backs. Marius hates the rumours, but Cosette meets them all with her head held high. She could not care less. 

Camille is seven when their own daughter arrives in the world, easily and without much fuss on a bright spring morning when the dew is still clinging to the grass. She is as angelic as her mother, with her rosy cheeks and small hands. Camille is doting and curious, as proud as any older brother, furiously pushing his way into the room to steal his first glimpse of her. Marius feels like a villain for deceiving the boy so, and allowing him to believe she is his sister. He wonders, perhaps, if he would be old enough yet to understand the dangerous weight of his true parentage. He doubts it; Cosette lays a gentle hand on his arm and urges him to wait a few years. It is not a story for children, what happened to Enjolras and Grantaire, and Camille deserves to steal a few more innocent years for himself.

He is twelve when he starts to ask questions; Marius and Cosette had long prepared themselves for the day they would tell him the truth. They had planned it carefully for the day he turned thirteen, but Camille, clever and observant, beats them to it. He is not a fool, he tells them – he does not look like either of them. His hair is the wrong colour, the wrong texture, and neither of his supposed parents share the same nose as him, or his jawline, or even the shape of his brow. 'Where did you get me?' he begs, and Marius and Cosette cannot delay the terrible inevitable any longer.

'Sit down,' Marius urges, 'There is a lot to tell you.'

When the story is done, Camille seems relatively unshaken. He sits with his hands in his lap, lips pursed in deep thought. 'So my parents were revolutionaries,' he says at last, with a calm air that seems out of place for a child. Marius cannot look at him; he feels Enjolras' own judging eyes upon him. 'One of them, for certain', he says, 'The other, it seems in hindsight, died for love and not for liberty'. Camille nods slowly, taking it in. Marius wonders if Camille now hates him for their lies, if he should want nothing more to do with them. It is Cosette who is bold enough to give his fears a voice. She weeps openly, and Camille crosses the room to sit beside her. He holds her, tells her she has been his mother for twelve years and shall always remain so. Enjolras and Grantaire are long dead, their bones probably turned to dust in the ground; they cannot be his parents even if he wanted it so.

Though at first he appears unaffected by the revelation, Marius notices that it seems he cannot shake it off entirely. He pours curiously over the few writings on the June rebellion that he can find, and investigates his family history as best he can with so little to go by. Marius eventually relents to his curiosity; he retrieves the box of Enjolras' possessions that he had taken from his lodgings and presents them to his adopted son. It is not much; his writings and letters, a dried inkpot and some flyers from the Musain. He hides the books from him, however; they are too radical, too political, and Marius fears that to read them is to summon up spectres from his past that ought to remain dormant. He will not see Camille go down the same path, he swears. Camille will not die like his father before him, pinned to the wall by bullets like the figure of Christ.

Despite Marius' efforts, the books find their way into the boy's hands by the time he is fourteen. He does not know if he found them stashed in his study and stole them for himself, or if Cosette, with her soft heart, has committed some terrible betrayal and given them to him – but Camille acquires them, and Marius finds him one night, sat up in his bedroom by candlelight leafing through the pages. For a moment it is as though to glimpse into the past at Enjolras, as he may have been at that age; though Camille's hair is as dark as Grantaire's the candlelight guilds it momentarily, and the furrow of his brow and the concentration in his face are so reminiscent of Enjolras. Briefly, the boy is a ghost, and Marius feels a shiver of something akin to dread rattle his bones. He does not take the books from him; he feels he does not have the right. They were, afterall, his mother's – or his father's. Marius still does not know what to make of all that even now.

At sixteen, Camille's resemblance to Grantaire becomes uncanny. The first dark patches of facial hair begin to make an appearance, and his voice deepens to such a familiar tone that Marius is troubled by it. He has always looked like him, but as he grows older it becomes more and more pronounced, unavoidable, unmistakable. Marius wonders what Enjolras might have thought to see him now; he often wonders how deeply the affection between he and Grantaire had truly run. He wonders if it had been nothing but passion, as changeable and tempestuous as the sea, or else like what he shared with Cosette - true and lasting. Would it warm Enjolras' cold heart, he thought, to see that Camille looked so like Grantaire? Or would it displease him? He decides it is not worth pondering on.

Marius is not a man of anger. He is even mocked, sometimes, for his gentle nature. 'Your wife has you under her thumb!' some men say, and he wants to laugh, because no such thing has ever been true. He is merely done with fighting; he hung up his temper like an old coat the day of June 6th, and never touched it again. But he is angry when Camille sneaks back into their home one night, dust on his boots and a pamphlet stuffed into his pocket that speaks of upheaval in the streets. He has been out to the bistro two streets down, where a small group of students have been making the same mistakes as his friends before him. And Camille, it appears, though younger than them by some years, has worked his way into their circle by way of his charm and intellect. All at once, upon realising this, Marius is furious – furious with worry, furious with fear. He realises in that moment that in the sixteen years he has had him, Camille has truly become his son. He realises, with a sting of fleeting shame, that Enjolras and Grantaire can be damned – that if Enjolras were to rise from the grave by some miracle and try to take back his child, Marius would fight him for him. He is my child, he thinks; I have raised him, he is mine. He vows that history will not repeat itself; it will not sink it's vicious claws into him, not whilst Marius still draws breath.

They argue; it is a nasty fight, full of vitriol and cruel words, and Marius raises his voice far louder than he had ever imagined he could. Cosette appears at the top of the stairs with a candle, horrified and awoken by the dispute; the fight dissipates at once, as though Cosette has some heavenly power to her person. 'Marius,' she says, after Camille has stormed away to his own room, 'He is nearly a man grown. You cannot stop him from doing as he pleases forever.' she is right, Marius knows, and that is the hardest part to swallow. Sooner or later Camille will be an adult in his own right, and then god only knows where it will lead him. For a brief, guilty moment Marius despises Enjolras - or rather, his blood and what it has brought forth in his son. Why could Camille not resemble Grantaire in character as well as appearance? Marius would have gladly taken all the vices and shame of a libertine over the ideals of a foolish revolutionary any day. They might lead him to disgrace - even to ruin - but unlikely to his death.

Nothing more is said about revolutionaries and students for some time. Their family dinners turn into silent, cold affairs, with Camille sitting as far from Marius as the distance of the table will allow. Cosette frets about him, and Marius cannot blame her. He is talkative, a trait he has inherited from Grantaire, but in the wake their argument his words seem reserved for simple, blunt answers of 'yes', 'no' and courtesies he is expected to make. He eats his food without conversation and leaves as soon as his plate has been cleared. Once again Marius finds himself sleepless at night, listening intently, fearing he will hear the sound of the door as Camille sneaks away to certain doom.

It is February when Marius' worst fears come to fruition. He wakes at first light after a night tormented by dreams of carnage and blood to find that, like some terrible prophecy, there has been an uprising in Paris. Camille is gone. His bed is cold and a floorboard in his bedroom has been pried up with a metal pipe – Marius does not need to guess what had been kept hidden there. He wonders how the boy even acquired a gun, but the logistics of it are the least of his concerns. Cosette is frantic. The whole household holds it's breath. Marius, however, cannot bring himself to sit in the parlour and wait for the news that his son is dead. He dons his coat and cap, meaning to go out and search for him. Deep down he is paralysed with fear. To go back to a barricade after all these years, to see it all again...he does not know if he can handle such a thing. He fears the smell of smoke and the sound of gunfire will make him come undone, that he will be transformed back into a young, frightened student. But, he decides, Camille's life is worth far more than his own. If he should die, it will be with good cause. He kisses Cosette and his daughter farewell and slips into the streets.

When he finds the bistro that Camille has been frequenting, it is already over. He expects to find a barricade laid to waste there, a shattered monument of broken bodies, murdered ideals and old furniture. He expects, with cold dread in his heart, to have to pick out the body of his adopted child from a line of corpses. What greets him instead renders him speechless. The doors to the bistro are wide open, and all through the street people are cheering, celebrating, laughing. Barrels of wine have been opened. A musician sings 'Ça ira' as loud as his lungs will let him. Flags hang from windows, windows that Marius had expected to find shuttered and locked as they had been in June of 1832. A rosy-faced young woman in a tricolour sash dances merrily past him on the arm of a National Guardsman who had put down his arms. Marius realises with astonishment that he is witnessing victory.

He finds Camille laughing with a group of his friends inside the bistro. His lips are stained red with wine, but he is not drunk, merely jovial. Marius is almost frozen to the spot as he watches the group. It is as though to see how things could have been for his own friends. They should have had this moment, he thinks; all of them crowded around the one table that was not sacrificed for the barricade, bruised and scuffed but alive, alive and jubilant. It is bittersweet. Wrenching himself from his daydream he calls out to Camille, and his son, suddenly noticing him in the room, rushes to embrace him, demanding to know why Marius is there, why he is not home where it is safe. All at once their conflict is forgotten; Marius feels as though his heart is about to burst. He is alive, and that is all that matters. But as he turns to introduce Marius to his friends, he is, just for a heartbeat, a ghost once again. He is more of Enjolras now than ever before, he thinks, and decides that he can make peace with that. Perhaps, he thinks, this was what Camille had been put on earth to do; that it was his destiny, preordained and unavoidable, to accomplish what Enjolras could not.

Yes, Marius decides. He can make peace with that.


End file.
